Too Female for Friday Prayer
How Muslim women got conned out of fully participating in the Sabbath
It’s a Friday morning. True to form, I’m curled up with my laptop in my pajamas. My aunt, who I’m staying with for a few days in Peshawar, Pakistan, gives me a scrutinizing look while scrunching her hair dry with a towel. “Aren’t you going to get ready for Friday prayer?”
I want to tell her no. Not because I don’t intend on praying, but because to me, the traditional preparation for the Islamic day of sabbath — showering, putting on new or clean clothes along with a bit of musk — is only worthwhile if I’m actually going to a mosque. In fact, Friday prayer is only Friday prayer when offered in a mosque where listening to an Imam’s sermon allows one to shorten the noon prayers Muslims are to perform at that time every other day of the week. Staying home and praying on one’s own — Friday or not — doesn’t merit tidying up to me, because without physically going to a mosque, it’s just a regular five times a day practice. Nothing more.
I look up but bite back these thoughts. I used to make a point to cleaning up on Friday morning when I actually went to Friday prayer while living in the US and UK, and I know well the sort of reverence Muslims have for these and many other customs of the Prophet Mohammad. But ever since moving to Pakistan, I haven’t been as into all of that because I know I won’t actually be going to a mosque. Few women do in Muslim majority countries, for reasons that are, as far as I can tell, either ill-informed or ill-intentioned. Either way, getting all dressed up to pray at home just doesn’t have all that much of an appeal to me.
Once I started looking into the issue of women praying in mosques, I was only less inclined to shower for the sake of praying on a Friday. That’s because some Islamic scholars cite women’s practice of the Prophetic tradition of polishing up before Friday prayers as the reason why women shouldn’t attend services during the Islamic holiday. Responding to a question on website Sunni Path, the Islamic scholar Amjad Rasheed writes that it’s disapproved of for women to go out (to the mosque or, apparently, anywhere else for that matter) “because of their beautifying themselves, perfuming themselves, revealing parts of their nakedness and mixing with men […] and coming into actual contact with them in places of over crowdedness and the like, where it is usually unavoidable, such as marketplaces and other places where people gather.”
Rasheed claims that if the Prophet “knew what women are doing today, he would have forbidden them to go to the masjid [mosque].”Apparently, this was the same logic used by third Caliph Omar bin Khattab when he tried to prevent women from mosques in the decades following the Prophet’s death, despite the fact that they had been active congregants during the Prophet Mohammad’s lifetime.
I’m no scholar, but the only hadith, or saying of the Prophet, that I’ve been able to find that addresses whether women should pray in mosques states, “It is more excellent for a woman to pray in her house than in her courtyard, and more excellent for her to pray in her private chamber than in her house.”
This seemingly unequivocal prescription of this hadith has kept millions of women from seeking a place among congregants at mosques across the world. But a deeper examination of this dictum shows that its been vastly misconstrued to meet a misogynistic end.
The statement was made after the Prophet had said that a Muslim earns twenty-seven times more blessings for praying in unison in a mosque than on their own. Some women then came to him to say that they had infant children or other household tasks that made it difficult for them to to go to the mosque several times a day. Fearing these obligations would keep them from earning the additional blessings, they asked for the Prophet Mohammad’s counsel. It’s only then that he told them that it would be all right for them to skip the mosque and pray in their own homes.
That is, the hadith is meant to offer reassurance (and equal blessings) to those women whose familial responsibilities keep them from easily attending the mosque not to keep all women from going to the mosque if they wish. Looking back at the hadith in light of this context, it seems to be the case that only women who pray at home because they are bound by household responsibilities will be “more excellent.”
Still, the vast majority of all women in Muslim majority countries don’t pray in mosques.
That is despite the exponential extra blessings for praying in unison. Despite decades of precedent for women praying in mosques during the time of Prophet himself. And despite another of his sayings which forbids men from keeping women from attending the mosque. Whether this is because they themselves are uncomfortable or are told they are unwelcome, it’s rare to see women in mosques in predominantly Muslim countries.
Except for a few notable exceptions, the premier of these being the mosque surrounding the Kaaba — Islam’s holiest site — where women pray side by side with men perhaps not only because it would be next to impossible to impose gender segregation on so many millions of people during the pilgrimage, but because that’s how it was done during the time of the Prophet, and even before him.
There are a few other mosques in Muslim-majority countries that women attend in large numbers, and as far as I can tell, and most appear to be either places of pilgrimage or architectural wonders that draw in tourists, Muslim or otherwise. Would a woman who wandered in wanting to pray in her neighborhood mosque in Egypt or Azerbaijan be allowed to pray or asked to leave?
In order to avoid finding out the hard way, women who want to pray in Muslim majority countries tend to seek out mosques where they are specifically accommodated into segregated areas or separate rooms. But even then, few women in Muslim countries avail these facilities, although they do draw more regular congregants in the America and Europe where they are generally a given in every mosque.
The prayer hall of my own hometown mosque in Ohio is divided into two equal parts where men pray beside women, separated by a waist high boundary. The same is the case for a few other mosques in the world, but for the most part, this shoulder-to-shoulder setup is either incredibly remarkable or utterly unacceptable — depending on who you ask.
For the most part, women’s spaces in mosques are not so illustrious. They tend to stand yards behind men, separated by a wall or in an isolated wing or in some back room hooked up with a speaker system so they can hear what’s being recited but not see who’s doing the reciting. These separate accommodations are often far from equal, and as one Muslim woman points out on her blog wood turtle, the “subtext” of this gender segregation as a way to keep men and women from sexual distraction while offering their five daily prayers isn’t all that encouraging.
She writes, “Oh great. I’m behind a barrier for my own spiritual good. If I weren’t hidden from the male gaze, I would cause the spiritual downfall of countless men. […] And apparently, humans are incapable of worship in the presence of the desirable other sex. Must really suck if you’re a gay Muslim and you’re forced to pray next to people you’re attracted to.”
It seems even when seeking God’s graces and when fully covered in the long garments and headscarf that most Muslim women wear to pray, a woman is invariably a seductress, or at the very least, a sexual object. Sadly, it’s this overwhelming archetype that in the end keeps women from being fully participant in their spiritual life or faith community.
Being a back-room congregant takes its toll. It’s hard to feel fully accepted in a place where you are deliberately made to feel invisible — even if you go there to get closer to a God you believe sees you as an equal among equals.
Suddenly, the base realities of our humanly existence — and its stark inequalities — become all too apparent to focus on one’s spiritual side. At least for me. I can’t stop thinking that the reason women are discouraged from attending the mosque for their five daily prayers because doing so would mean they’d have a religiously sanctioned reason to leave the house five times a day. This cynicism comes courtesy of the last few months that I’ve spent in Pakistan, going about my life and work despite all of the unsolicited prohibitions I’ve received urging me not to travel alone or buy fruit alone or basically go anywhere without a chaperone, preferably a blood relative, preferably a male blood relative.
It does seem that paternalism has pried its way into Islamic practice, even though the religion’s early days brought about then-radical egalitarianism. Not only were women allowed to pray in mosques behind the Prophet then, but there are records of them asking questions during the middle of his sermons. Islam also brought about a number of other female-friendly shifts to the social order of seventh century Saudi Arabia, including affording women right to collect inheritances and initiate divorces.
But, as Raza Aslan points out in his book No God But God, “[F]or fourteen centuries, the science of Quranic commentary has been the exclusive domain of Muslim men” who by and large brought their own misogynistic world views to bear on their readings of Islamic doctrine.
As a response, some Muslim feminists are striving to create a sense of equality in Islam through breaking down barrier walls at some mosques in the United States and Europe. But in the areas where Muslims are most concentrated, there are few efforts to simply make way for women to pray in mosques with the dignity that comes from equality.
The consequences of this exclusion are subtle and insidious. Men gain a sense of moral superiority, a self-attained favored son status that has come through undermining an essential foundation of the faith to which they have unfairly staked a larger claim. And in doing so, women have been conned out of the right to take up real equal footing before God. Somehow stepping into that sacred space has come to mean confronting centuries of beliefs that have become just as strong as religion itself — even though they stem from very human biases.
That’s why going through the Friday prayer rituals feels too much like acquiescing to the place men have carved out for women. My aunt says she likes making this extra effort to present herself to God on this holy day, but for me it isn’t the same. Barred by social protocol in the guise of religion from attending the special weekly service, going through the hassle feels worse than a farce. It’s a sort of deception meant to provide women with a male-condoned variation on a spiritual tradition under the pretence of a faith that brought about no such restrictions 1400 years ago.
